On Our Best Behavior

Author Elise Loehnen opens with a personal crisis: In late 2019, she hyperventilated for an entire month, unable to take a deep breath. In her therapist's office, she broke down, confessing she tried to be perfect and do everything for everyone. Her therapist observed that Loehnen was living up to a saintly ideal, convinced that being "good enough" would keep her safe from judgment. This realization triggered a resolve to investigate what had been holding her down. Drawing on her career interviewing hundreds of cultural influencers, Loehnen presents her central thesis: The Seven Deadly Sins, though not found in the Bible, have permeated Western culture so deeply that they function as invisible rules controlling women's behavior, compelling them to suppress natural instincts to prove their virtue regardless of religious belief.

Before examining each sin, Loehnen traces a history of patriarchal control. For most of human existence, she argues, people lived in partnership-based societies that revered a "Great Mother" as the creative force behind life. Around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, the shift to agriculture and resulting resource conflicts gave rise to hierarchical cultures in which women and children became property. The Hebrew Bible introduced divine sanction for these arrangements, and early Christianity was shaped by the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 to confirm an all-male apostolic tradition. Gospels that challenged this mission were declared heretical, including the gospel attributed to Mary Magdalene, an early Christian figure whom the institutional church later marginalized. The Seven Deadly Sins originated not in scripture but with Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth-century desert monk who created "Eight Thoughts" as warnings against inner demons. Pope Gregory I later refined these into the familiar sins and assigned them to Mary Magdalene, branding her a whore and condemning all women as embodiments of sin. The Inquisition and the witch hunts, which targeted tens of thousands of women, cemented a legacy of fear that Loehnen argues persists in women's self-restriction today.

In her chapter on sloth, Loehnen describes her own compulsive busyness, rooted in an upbringing by a mother who modeled relentless productivity and a father who expected his effort to be justified by the family's output. She traces how the Protestant work ethic made labor a form of penance and how the Industrial Revolution turned time into money. She presents data showing women report higher stress, perform far more household labor, and bear disproportionate childcare responsibility, even as primary breadwinners. The pandemic drove four times as many women as men out of the labor force. Loehnen argues that apathy, not sloth, is the true sin, and that women must reclaim rest rather than exhaust themselves proving their value.

Her chapter on envy reframes the emotion as a guide to desire. Loehnen cites psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb's advice to "follow your envy" because it reveals what a person truly wants, and describes discovering that her own irritation with other women consistently masked envy of their accomplishments. She explores how girls learn to suppress competition, expressing it only through indirect hostility, and examines the mother-daughter dynamic in which daughters carry guilt about surpassing their mothers' ambitions. She introduces manifestation expert Lacy Phillips's concept of "expanders," people whose achievements make others' dreams feel attainable, as a positive alternative to scarcity thinking.

In her chapter on pride, Loehnen opens with actress Anne Hathaway's 2013 Oscar acceptance speech, in which Hathaway was publicly excoriated for seeming too prepared, while fellow actress Jennifer Lawrence was celebrated for stumbling charmingly. Loehnen presents research showing that women who display confidence in leadership receive backlash from both men and women, and recounts how her own parents cautioned her against getting "a big head" despite her achievements as a nationally ranked mogul skier. She interviews psychologist Craig Malkin, who explains "echoism," a lack of healthy narcissism in which people fear seeming prideful. More women than men struggle with echoism. Loehnen argues that pride in one's unique gifts is essential and that each person's contribution to the collective is irreplaceable.

Her chapter on gluttony examines women's tortured relationship with food and their bodies. Loehnen describes growing up with a father whose vigilance around weight created a judgmental household atmosphere. She presents evidence of pervasive cultural fat-phobia, traces the history of thinness as the standard for beauty, and cites research showing that 83 percent of people who lose weight on calorie-restricting diets regain more than they originally lost. She recounts her experience with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, during which she accessed a suppressed childhood trauma and felt for the first time that she was truly in her body. She argues that women need body neutrality, a freedom from external standards, rather than body positivity, which still prescribes how women should feel.

In her chapter on greed, Loehnen traces the sin from Evagrius's extreme asceticism to Pope Gregory I, who classified greed as sinful primarily to encourage donations to the church, and then to Martin Luther, who critiqued the church for making greed respectable while selling indulgences. She notes that only six women appear in the top 40 of the Forbes global billionaires list, all heirs to fortunes built by men. She interviews Sallie Krawcheck, founder of the investment platform Ellevest, who explains that the gender wealth gap is worsening partly because women invest less, even though they outperform men when they do invest. During a trip to India, Loehnen recounts how a young scholar of Vedanta, a Hindu philosophical tradition, taught her that the moment before acquisition provides the most delight, after which the object depreciates. She argues that women must work toward sufficiency rather than endless accumulation.

Her chapter on lust opens with Loehnen's account of dissociating during sex for most of her life and eventually accessing a suppressed memory of childhood molestation during MDMA therapy. She traces religion's condemnation of sexuality to Saint Augustine's fourth-century theory of original sin, in which he interpreted Adam and Eve's awareness of their nakedness as lust, despite Jesus never condemning sex. She examines the failures of American sex education, the persistence of slut-shaming, and the rates of sexual violence against women. She recounts her own sexual assault at age 15, describing how she carried decades of shame before learning that orgasm during assault is a documented fear response. She concludes that reclaiming pleasure and creative vitality is essential for entering a more balanced era.

In her chapter on anger, Loehnen discovers that her chronic jaw pain maps onto her type in the Enneagram, a nine-type personality system with roots in Evagrius's original list. Her type's core passion is latent anger, and she connects the jaw tension to years of suppressed resentment. She presents evidence that women's public anger is culturally unacceptable, drawing on therapist Harriet Lerner's observation that the English language has no unflattering term for men who vent anger at women. She draws on mediator Marshall Rosenberg's "nonviolent communication" framework to argue that anger stems from unmet needs and that women have been socialized to believe expressing needs is selfish. She examines how white women struggle to channel their rage because they fear losing proximity to power, while Black women's clearer relationship with anger has made them more effective agents of change.

Her final chapter reclaims sadness, which was among Evagrius's original eight thoughts but was later dropped from the list. Loehnen argues that sadness's exclusion is especially harmful to men, who are taught to perceive the emotion as weak. She recounts the death of her brother Ben's husband, Peter, from a rare heart condition and how the experience gave her a larger spiritual context. She cites therapist Terry Real's assertion that boys are more sensitive than girls until about age four or five, when they are pushed away from their emotions, and argues that this disconnection creates "wounded boys" who become "wounding men," perpetuating cycles of trauma.

In the conclusion, Loehnen reveals that the Seven Deadly Sins appear in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, a text rooted in the Gnostic tradition, an early Christian mystical movement deemed heretical by the institutional church. In Mary's gospel, Jesus declares that sin is an invention of man that occurs when people deviate from who they are at their root, and that the Divine is not external but inside each person. Loehnen maps the seven "powers" Christ encounters in Mary's gospel onto Evagrius's list, arguing that these concepts describe an internal journey of alignment rather than external moral edicts. She calls for resacralizing the feminine, reconciling masculine qualities of truth, order, and direction with feminine qualities of creativity, nurturance, and care in every person, regardless of gender. She closes with an invocation that people judge themselves lightly, do the work of feeling so they can heal, embrace loss so they can seize life, and allow grief so they can experience joy.